For years, I’ve been saying that I would trade all future Star Wars projects if I could only get a Tron 3.

I almost still hold to this idea. I would not like to have lost Andor, and certainly Rogue One was good and the sequel trilogy had its moments. But I still really, really wanted a third Tron film to exist.

It’s not because I can’t see the weaknesses in the original Tron–you can read about my thoughts about that film here. It’s not because I thought Tron Legacy was all that awesome–you can read some words on that subject here. It’s just that the there’s something about the whole world of Tron, the aesthetic, the vibe, that I really enjoy. So I was looking forward to Tron: Ares, directed by Joachim Rønning, even though I did not have particularly high expectations that it would be a genuinely good movie.

But for much of the film, I was having a pretty good time.

Spoilers

The story is about the latest development of the technology that we saw in the first two movies, which is basically to take the weapons, technology and even digital soldiers that exist in the “Grid” (the interior world of the computers) and basically print them into the real world. Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), the grandson of the first movie’s villain, runs a company that is selling this to the government because of the enormous military potential. But he hasn’t told them that the limits of the process means that things can only exist for 29 minutes before they “derez” into digital nothingness.

Thus the McGuffin of the film becomes the “Permanence Code” that Kevin Flynn (from the first two movies, and sort of from this one as well, played by Jeff Bridges) apparently created before his disappearance many years prior, which will allow things to continue to exist. The latest head of Flynn’s company ENCOM is Eve Kim (Greta Lee), a young prodigy haunted by the death of her sister and partner to disease, who finds this code and spends the first third of the film trying to get it back to ENCOM headquarters before Dillinger can steal it. Unfortunately, he has sent after her Ares (Jared Leto), a ruthless security program from his system, who has 29 minutes to chase her down.

This leads to a. bunch of cool action scenes with Light Cycles racing through the streets of Los Angeles. Eventually Eve destroys the code, but because she’s seen it, Dillinger and Ares zap her into the Grid, where they intend to retrieve it from her memory, even at the cost of her life. However, Ares has been impacted by Eve’s empathy, which sets up his betrayal of Dillinger, and efforts to help Eve reintegrate in the real world.

Up until this point, I was enjoying Ares quite a bit. The action was fun and included a particularly awesome moment where Eve sends a motorcycle crashing into a pursuing Light Cycle. I was also getting to revisit the wildly imaginative digital world that I had enjoyed so much before, including a beautiful looking body of digital water. Greta Lee was proving to be a sympathetic presence, and Jared Leto was fine as the stoic but troubled Ares.

But then the sequence of Ares and Eve escaping Ares’ former colleagues and returning to the real world was over way too quickly, and the next section of the film descended into set pieces that were far too routine and run-of-the-mill, as if we were watching any other action film (unsurprisingly, none of these shots made it into the trailer). “Highlights” include stealing a car and engaging in banter. Supposedly this is there to develop character and deepen their motivations, but it’s clunky and unnatural, and Leto is particularly unengaging with this sort of material. Ares and Eve are aided by a little band of supporting characters who barely get personalities or anything to distinguish them one from another, and the script overly relies on dialogue call-backs (ie someone says something that someone else said earlier, as some sort of short cut for creating emotional meaning). It’s lazy storytelling.

The climax of the film gives us some big images, like a giant Recognizer flying through the real world city causing massive damage, but it’s not enough to save the back half of the movie.

It’s by no means disastrously bad, but it’s certainly disappointing, and if you are not someone like me who geeks out to pay another visit to the world of Tron, it’s not liable to make much of an impression. I think perhaps the movie’s fatal flaw is the fact that once Ares has made his decision to rebel, he is simply not an interesting character. His situation is dramatic and intense (29 minutes to live, and no do-overs this time) but you wouldn’t know it to look at him. None of the implications of his plight are explored, none of the stakes explored…and so his eventual victory doesn’t make an impact.

I mentioned before that Jeff Bridges sort of plays Kevin Flynn again. More specifically (aside from one brief flashback) he is playing a digital avatar of Flynn, sort of a personalised User Interface for Ares when he enters the “original” system–the digital world witnessed in the first Tron movie. His sequence is pretty short and doesn’t amount to a whole lot, which is not surprising since he’s not really playing a proper character. It’s the sort of role that’s written when you aren’t sure if the actor is going to be available to film it, because it’s ultimately not that significant to the story. I love Jeff Bridges–he’s one of my favorite actors–but his closing moments in Tron Legacy are a lot more meaningful.

Garrett Hedlund’s Sam (from Tron Legacy) is name-checked a bunch of times in the movie, and both he and Olivia Wilde’s Quorra appear via archive photographs at the end, when it’s revealed that Ares is out looking for them. For fans of their movie, it’s nice that they are remembered, but it’s has also has the unfortunate side effect of making this movie feel like a footnote to their’s, as if the real sequel that we are waiting for is for a different movie, and one we will almost certainly never see.

In this way, Tron remains a giant “what could have been?” franchise. What if a sequel featuring a young Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner had been made in the 1980s? What if the hoped-for follow up to Tron Legacy, which was to have featured Hedlund, Wilde and Boxleitner, had been made in the 2010s? What if Tron Ares had had the budget to allow more of its story to take place in the digital world, lessening the parts of the movie I found least interesting? What if any of these projects had been more successful, allowing the franchise to continue into the future? What if, what if, what if?

It’s the sort of question that is only interesting to relatively small group of people it seems, like myself. And it’s the sort of question that is kind of meaningless to spend any time on.

As it is, I’m still glad I got to see that third Tron movie. Even though it’s probably the least satisfying of the three, there were parts of it I still enjoyed, so I’d far rather it exist than not.

But at the same time, I wish it had been better.

Other Thoughts

Incidentally, when Ares gets to the original system, he finds it empty except for the Bit from the first movie, and the avatar of Flynn, who only seems to be there because Ares himself is there and requires some sort of user interface. Now, the first movie was about setting that system free from the control of the Master Control Program. What happened to all the programs that were living there? Did Flynn just erase them? Oh well, I guess I can just head canon it that he put them all into the system that we saw in Tron Legacy.

Also, during this film the plucky band of supporting characters help by digitally bombing Dillinger’s system, so that the main physical antagonist (Ares’ former assistant) doesn’t have a place to go back to when her 29 minutes are up. But that place was full of sentient computer programs! It seems kind of like a sort of genocide going on there. The characters weren’t necessarily to know that, but the film certainly did and so did my daughter in the audience, who pointed this out to me. Dang, pretty dark stuff!